Austen Deans: a life in paint

DAVID HALLETT/The Press

AUSTEN DEANS AT HOME: continuing to live his dream.

DAVID HALLETT/The Press

AT WORK: Austen Deans concentrates on one of his landscapes.

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His family name is synonymous with Canterbury, and painting its many landscapes his life's work. Austen Deans was also an artist in the Greek campaign and prison camps of World War 2. He talks to ROSA SHIELS at his home at Peel Forest.

We are sitting in a wooden frame house nestled into the bush, with a cloud-strewn snowy peak as a backdrop and the view falling away to the distant ocean across the plains.

This is Peel Forest, South Canterbury, and in the chair opposite, sharing the tasty nettle soup he has cooked for us, is a small man in his early 90s, thick thatches of white eyebrows resting on wire-rimmed glasses over intense blue eyes, neat beard framing a sun-dappled face.

Through the window over his shoulder, we can see a rifleman darting into a driftwood nesting box under the eaves. Photographer David Hallett is also a passionate birdman and is delighted, having spent many a long hour in pristine southern areas and never able to photograph a rifleman in the bush. He makes a date to come back to photograph the bird.

This is the house and studio of Alister Edward Austen Deans, known as Austen, scion of the dynastic Canterbury family and sire of his own dynasty of seven sons; painter, farmer, backwoodsman.

There's a tangible serenity to this scene which emanates from the man before us, who, comfortable with his daily purpose, spends hours in action or reflection in his studio in front of a canvas or sheet of stretched watercolour paper, mulling over how best to capture in paint the Canterbury landscape in his mind's eye.

The canvases in oils, watercolours and tempera signed AA Deans that cram every conceivable piece of wall space in his house bear testimony to a lifetime living out his dream and potential as a working artist.

He didn't do it alone, though, and is quick to acknowledge the graciousness and capability of his late wife Liz in raising the family and managing the farm, enabling him to concentrate on painting, which is largely a solitary if not selfish pursuit.

"I think I must have managed to mix it enough, because the boys have never held it against me as far as I know. I suppose I left an awful lot to my good wife, who was very capable and she just seemed to manage without any fuss," he says.

As well as raising the boys, Liz ran a Welsh mountain pony stud, raised suffolk sheep and some cattle, and ran an organic farm on their 5212 hectares.

"Her breeding ideas set the style to a good extent for pony breeding in New Zealand; her stock was always thought of as good stock."

The painting was what kept the family going, Deans maintains, but the farm added the luxury items.

"We lived off the painting. The farm managed to produce enough money to take us all on skiing holidays in September, and it paid for a certain amount of petrol and things like that."

All of this is only part of the intriguing AA Deans story, and what went before Liz, the boys and the farm plotted the outline of the tale shaping the years to come.

The Deans name is inexorably linked with Canterbury. The first Europeans to settle on the plains in 1843 in their pit-sawn timber cottage at Riccarton, Austen Deans' pioneering forebears left their name and impact across the region, and descendants – rugby coach Robbie Deans and singer Julia Deans, to name two – continue to make their mark today.

Austen Deans was raised on the family farms, Morven Hills, near Sheffield, then Homebush, and educated at schools for the well-heeled Cantabrian – Medbury, then Christ's College – before achieving his diploma (1938) from the University of Canterbury School of Art, where Bill Sutton was a contemporary: "He was the most brilliant student. He never really quite fulfilled his experience as a student. He did fine work, but as a student he could do anything any of the instructors could do, and do it better.

"He did find a style in the end that was more or less completely his, but what he was brilliant at was understanding how other people's work was done and doing it just as well."

Owen Lee was another contemporary: "He produced in his later years some of the most beautiful nudes Ive ever seen. He very seldom exhibited them. He had an incredible eye."

Of Russell Clark, who preceded him at art school, he says, "He could copy anybody's style a long time before he seemed to produce a style of his own. But he did, in the end, and I admired it very much, too."

The next chapter of Deans life began with the onset of World War 2, much of which is documented in the new Hazard Press publication, The Art of War: New Zealand war artists in the field 1939-1945 by Jenny Haworth. This book looks at the work of artists Peter McIntyre, Allan Barns-Graham, Russell Clark, John McIndoe and Deans (the last one standing).

There had been lobbying from various quarters before the war in support of Deans' position as official war artist. His art was well regarded at home, and his mother, who had been widowed by Passchendaele, was particularly keen her son be given the job.

He was finally given the task of painting the Greek campaign in the role of assistant war artist to Peter McIntyre. But in an abiding and probably lifesaving irony, he was caught by a tripwire on Crete, injured by the subsequent landmine explosion, and captured the next day after the German parachute-invasion. He spent the next four years as a prisoner of war, moved from location to location at the whim of his captors, able to paint camp life and environs rather than active service, and using whatever materials were at hand and what he could buy with cigarettes or camp marks.

Tired of painting the same views out of the same windows, he began sketching portraits of fellow prisoners, a lesser known but highly skilled side of his oeuvre.

At the end of the war, after liberating himself from an Austrian POW camp with the help of a fellow prisoner, a bunch of their mates, and an appropriated German truck, Deans returned home. He married Liz in 1946, travelled to England and studied art at the Sir John Cass College (1948-50) before returning home and settling into his Peel Forest farm among the landscape that has always held a magnetic attraction for him.

Deans has climbed in the back country ever since he was a youth, and some of the most majestic paintings in his house are of breathtaking snow-covered tops in the Southern Alps, views which are accessible only to intrepid climbers or small-plane pilots or passengers.

Among these paintings is a large framed colour photograph of two strong but elderly men astride a peak after a climb. Austen, in a shirt and kilt, is on the left, and his brother David on the right. The location is the Copeland Pass, which they reached in 1998 when the brothers were both in their 80s.

Deans still ventures out into the back country to paint, often with painter Ben Woollcombe, a former school friend of his sons.

The rest of the time he can be found in his studio, log fire ablaze, rendering his vision with brush and pigment in his preferred watercolour medium.

Austen Deans' work is held in major public and private collections throughout New Zealand, and there are examples on the deansart. co.nz website that he shares with his sculptor son Paul.

Apart from South Canterbury Art Society shows and events, Austen Deans says he prefers to focus on his own work and environs, rather than spending time in galleries and at openings, but as New Zealand's last living war artist, he made an exception for the April opening of the National Collection of War Art exhibition at the New Zealand Archives (www. archives.govt.nz) in Wellington.

Today, standing steady before his painting table, legs still carrying the shrapnel from the Allied landmine that injured him on Crete, Austen Deans continues to pursue his lifetime's purpose, painting works for himself and commissions for others, and enjoying the return of the tiny rifleman to its box on the deck.

"I decided quite a long time ago, soon after the war, either you become an exhibition buff, going around all the exhibitions, knowing all about it and doing very little work, or you try and find something that you think you can do reasonably well and stick to it and do it. And I chose the latter."

* The Art of War: New Zealand war artists in the field 1939-1945 by Jenny Haworth. Hazard Press, $59.99.